If you’re looking to have a little Intel in your iPhone, it may come sooner than you think. Intel is looking to buy Germany-based Infineon’s wireless chips.
Reputable teardown sites make it clear that Infineon silicon plays a pretty important role in the iPad and iPhone 4. UMB TechInsights shows two chips: An Infineon A GSM/W-CDMA transceiver and a baseband processor.
The baseband processor–which handles the 3G connection–is one of the most critical chips. “This processor has HSDPA/HSUPA capabilities of 7.2Mbps/2.9Mbps and the ability to connect to cameras with up to 5 MPixels like the one found on the iPhone 4G (the X-GOLD 618 version),” according to TechInsights. (HSDPA stands for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access. HSUPA is the acronym for High-Speed Uplink Packet Access.)
[via CNET]